With the horrific tragedy
in Texas, this week we wanted to share a message from Our Revolution's
Texas Coordinator Chris Kutalik-Cauthern in it's entirety as we felt it
was urgently important.

Here is Chris' (from 'Our
Revolution') note:"

"Thousands in our state are suffering because of Hurricane Harvey and
spillover flooding since this weekend. Our Revolution Texas members are
among them. Many of us around the state are wondering how we can
volunteer and donate to help the many in hard-hit areas. We all know
that showing solidarity in trying times is an important part of what we
do and why we do it as progressive populists.

In the Houston Area

If you have a flat-bottomed boat or a high-water vehicle, you are
urgently needed. Call 713-881-3100.

If you are in need of immediate help from a life-threatening emergency
call 9-1-1.

If you are or know others in need of non-emergency help call 3-1-1 in
Houston or 2-1-1 in nearby areas.

Outside Houston

Local relief groups, progressive organizations, unions, and immigrant
rights groups are already mobilizing grassroots relief efforts. Here is
a list of groups and efforts you can plug into to help.

The
Texas Workers Relief Fund.
A union-relief effort by the Texas AFL-CIO, donations are
tax-deductible. The state fed has been closely coordinating with the
Houston and Corpus-area central labor councils to provide material aid.

RNRN
Disaster Relief Fund. Our ally the National Nurses United organizes
medical relief for major disasters through this fund.

Hurricane
Harvey Relief Fund.
Houston's mayor has set up this fund to assist with victims of
Houston's ongoing and increasingly dangerous flooding. Donations are
tax-deductible.

The extreme enforcement policies of SB4 and ICE have put immigrant
workers in increased harm's way through the crisis. Immigrant and
refugee groups such as RAICES
in San Antonio are moving to get aid directly to immigrant families.
Jumping in now is just the beginning."

We'd also like to encourage you to donate to one of the organizations
in our OOA Organizing booklet, Covenant
House,
which helps homeless children and teens and is keeping their doors open
for them at their Houston Shelter throughout these difficult times.

In gratitude and solidarity for your compassion for those suffering in
Texas today, and for those suffering, every day, all over the world,

I drink coffee
in the morning on a round, ornate oak table that once belonged to
Harlan Fiske Stone, a U.S. Supreme Court justice from 1925 to 1946 and
the chief justice for the last five of those years. Stone and his
family spent their summers on this windswept, remote island six miles
off the coast of Maine.

Stone, a
Republican and close friend of Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover,
embodied a lost era in American politics. His brand of conservatism,
grounded in the belief that the law is designed to protect the weak
from the powerful, bears no resemblance to that of the self-proclaimed
“strict constitutionalists” in the Federalist
Society who have accumulated tremendous power in the judiciary. The
Federalist Society, at the behest of President Trump, is in charge of
vetting the 108 candidates for the federal judgeships that will be
filled by the administration. The newest justice, Trump appointee Neil
Gorsuch, comes out of the Federalist Society, as did Justices Clarence
Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito. The self-identified “liberals”
in the judiciary, while progressive on social issues such as abortion
and affirmative action, serve corporate power as assiduously as the
right-wing ideologues of the Federalist Society. The Alliance
for Justice points out that 85 percent of President Barack Obama’s
judicial nominees—280, or a third of the federal judiciary—had either
been corporate attorneys or government prosecutors. Those who came out
of corporate law firms accounted for 71 percent of the nominees, with
only 4 percent coming from public interest groups and the same
percentage having been attorneys who represented workers in labor
disputes.

Stone repeatedly
warned that unchecked corporate power would mean corporate tyranny and
the death of democracy. He was joined in that thinking by Louis D.
Brandeis, his fellow justice and ally on the court, who stated, “We can
have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth
concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.”

The supposed
clash between liberal and conservative judges is largely a fiction. The
judiciary, despite the Federalist Society’s high-blown rhetoric about
the sanctity of individual freedom, is a naked tool of corporate
oppression. The most basic constitutional rights—privacy, fair trials
and elections, habeas corpus, probable-cause requirements, due process
and freedom from exploitation—have been erased for many, especially the
2.3 million people in our prisons, most having been put there without
ever going to trial. Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and
associations are criminalized. Our judicial system, as Ralph Nader has
pointed out, has legalized secret law, secret courts, secret evidence,
secret budgets and secret prisons in the name of national security.

Our
constitutional rights have steadily been stripped from us by judicial
fiat. The Fourth Amendment reads: “The right of the people to be secure
in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall
issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and
particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or
things to be seized.” Yet our telephone calls and texts, emails and
financial, judicial and medical records, along with every website we
visit and our physical travels, can be and commonly are tracked,
recorded, photographed and stored in government computer banks.

The executive
branch can order the assassination
of U.S. citizens without trial. It can deploy the military into the
streets to quell civil unrest under Section 1021 of the National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and seize citizens—seizures that are
in essence acts of extraordinary
rendition—and hold them indefinitely in military detention centers
while denying them due process.

Corporate
campaign contributions, which largely determine who gets elected, are
viewed by the courts as protected forms of free speech under the First
Amendment. Corporate lobbying, which determines most of our
legislation, is interpreted as the people’s right to petition the
government. Corporations are legally treated as persons except when
they carry out fraud and other crimes; the heads of corporations
routinely avoid being charged and going to prison by paying fines,
usually symbolic and pulled from corporate accounts, while not being
forced to admit wrongdoing. And corporations have rewritten the law to
orchestrate a massive tax boycott.

Many among the 1
million lawyers in the United States, the deans of our law schools and
the judges in our courts, whether self-identified liberals or
Federalist Society members or supporters, refuse to hold corporate
power accountable to the law. They have failed us. They alone have the
education and skill to apply the law on behalf of the citizens. They
alone know how to use the courts for justice rather than injustice.
When this period of American history is written, the legal profession
will be found to have borne much of the responsibility for our descent
into corporate tyranny. Lawyers are supposed to be “officers of the
court.” They are supposed to be sentinels and guardians of the law.
They are supposed to enlarge our access to justice. They are supposed
to defend the law, not subvert it. This moral failure by the legal
profession has obliterated our rights.

The radical
libertarians in the Federalist Society, now ascendant within the legal
system, champion a legal doctrine that is essentially preindustrial. It
is centered exclusively on the rights of the individual and restricting
the power of government. This can at times lead to rulings that protect
personal liberty. The followers of this doctrine on the Supreme Court,
for example, voted to overturn Connecticut’s eminent-domain rape of a
New London working-class neighborhood to make way for a pharmaceutical
plant. The liberals, who formed the court majority, endorsed the taking
of the neighborhood.

Another example
of radical libertarianism on the bench occurred when attorneys Bruce
Afran and Carl Mayer and I sued
President Obama over Section 1021 of the NDAA, which overturned the
1878 act that prohibited the government from using the military as a
domestic police force. We garnered support from some charter members of
the Federalist Society. The proclivity by the Federalist Society to
hold up the primacy of individual rights became especially important
when, after the temporary injunction of Section 1021 issued by the U.S.
District Court for the Southern District of New York was overturned by
the appellate court, we had to file a cert, or petition, to request
that the case, Hedges v. Obama, be heard before the Supreme Court.

“As obnoxious as
[Antonin] Scalia was on cultural issues, he was the strongest modern
justice in terms of protecting First Amendment speech, press and
assembly rights—no liberal came anywhere near him in these areas,”
Afran told me about the late justice. “In fact, Scalia was the justice
who sympathized with our cert petition in the NDAA case. [Justice Ruth
Bader] Ginsburg denied our petition without circulating it among the
other justices. When we went to Scalia, he immediately asked for
additional briefs to circulate. It was his dissents in the Guantanamo
cases that we relied on in our cert petition. He issued strong
dissents holding that the Guantanamo inmates and others taken by the
military in Afghanistan should have complete civil rights in criminal
prosecutions. He went much further than the majority did in these cases
and condemned any holding of civilians by the military.”

But although the
Federalist Society purports to be against curtailment of civil
liberties, with some members embracing traditional liberal positions on
issues such as drug laws and sexual freedom, the organization also
supports the judicial system’s position that corporations hold the
rights of individuals. It is hostile to nearly all government
regulations and regulatory agencies including the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It
opposes the rights of labor unions, voting rights laws, gender equality
laws and the separation of church and state. It seeks to outlaw
abortion and overturn Roe v. Wade. The self-proclaimed “originalism” or “textualism”
philosophy of the Federalist Society has crippled the ability of the
legal system to act en masse in class action suits against corrupt
corporate entities. And for all the rhetoric about championing
individual liberty, as Mayer pointed out, “they never did a thing about
any First Amendment intrusions that all of the legislation passed after
9/11 involved.” The Supreme Court did not accept our cert, leaving
Section 1021 as law.

The Federalist
Society says it seeks legal interpretations that are faithful to those
that would have been made at the time the Constitution was written in
the late 18th century. This fossilization of the law is a clever
rhetorical subterfuge to advance the interests of the corporations and
the oligarchs who have bankrolled the Federalist Society—the Mercer
Foundation,
the late John
Olin, the
late Richard
Scaife, the Lynde
and Harry Bradley
Foundation,
the Koch
brothers and the fossil fuel industry. The Federalist Society has
close ties with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), whose
lobbyists draft and push corporate-sponsored bills through state
legislatures and Congress.

Stone knew that
the law would become moribund if it was frozen in time. It was a living
entity, one that had to forever adapt to changing economic, social and
political reality. He embraced what Oliver
Wendell Holmes called “legal realism.” The law was not only about
logic but also about the experience of a lived human society. If judges
could not read and interpret that society, if they clung to rigid dogma
or a self-imposed legal fundamentalism, then the law would be
transformed into a sterile constitutionalism. Stone called on judges to
“have less reverence for the way in which an old doctrine was applied
to an old situation.” The law had to be flexible. Judges, to carry out
astute rulings, had to make a close study of contemporary politics,
economics, domestic and global business practices and culture, not
attempt to intuit what the Founding Fathers intended.

Stone was wary
of radicals and socialists. He could be skeptical of New Deal programs,
although he believed the court had no right to reverse New Deal
legislation. But he understood that the law was the primary institution
tasked with protecting the public from predatory capitalism and the
abuses of power. He voted consistently with Holmes and Brandeis, two of
the court’s most innovative and brilliant jurists. The three were so
often in dissent to the conservative majority they were nicknamed “The
Three Musketeers.”

The law, Stone
said, must never “become the monopoly of any social or economic class.”
He condemned his fellow conservatives for reading their economic
preferences into the law and “into the Constitution as well.” By doing
so, he said, they “placed in jeopardy a great and useful institution of
government.”

Stone embraced
the doctrine of “preferred freedoms”—the position that First Amendment
freedoms are preeminent in the hierarchy of constitutional rights,
permitting justices to override any legislation that curbs these
freedoms. This became the basis for court decisions to overturn state
laws that persecuted and silenced African-Americans, radicals—including
communists, anarchists and socialists—and labor and religious activists.

Stone, as dean
of Columbia Law School before being named U.S. attorney general in 1924
and joining the Supreme Court the year after that, said the school’s
mission was “devoted to teaching its students how to live rather than
how to make a living.”He denounced the
Palmer Raids
and mass deportations of radicals that
ended in 1920. He supported five
Socialist members of the New York State Assembly

who were stripped of their elected seats by their legislative
colleagues in 1920 because of their political views. And he said that
everyone, including
aliens—meaning those who were not citizens but who lived in the United
States—deserved due process.

As attorney
general he weeded out corrupt officials and zealously enforced
antitrust laws, swiftly making enemies of many leading industrialists,
including Andrew Mellon. He also, ominously,
appointed J. Edgar Hoover to run the FBI. His aggressive antitrust
campaigns led to calls by the business community for his removal as
attorney general, and he was elevated to the Supreme Court in 1925, a
move that, as the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser newspaper
observed, “protected business from disturbing litigation or the threat
of such litigation [and] has saved the [Coolidge] administration from
the charge that it has betrayed business. …”

The 1920s were,
as Alpheus Thomas Mason wrote in his 1956 biography, “Harlan Fiske
Stone: Pillar of the Law,” “a decade pre-eminent for the exploitative
large-scale business; its leaders preached the ‘Gospel of Goods.’
‘Canonization of the salesman’ was seen ‘as the brightest hope of
America.’ The absorbing ambition was to make two dollars grow where one
had grown before, to engineer, as utilities magnate Samuel Insull put
it, ‘all I could out of a dollar’—that is, get something for nothing.”

Organized labor,
which before World War I had been a potent social and political force,
had been crushed through government repression, including the use of
the Espionage and Sedition acts. Government regulations and controls
had been weakened or abolished. It was a time when, as Sinclair Lewis
said of Babbittry—referring to the philistine behavior of the lead
character in his 1922 novel “Babbitt,” about the vacuity of American
culture—the goal in life was to be “rich, fat, arrogant, and superior.”
Inequality had reached appalling levels, with 60 percent of American
families existing barely above subsistence level by the time of the
1929 crash. The American god was profit. Those not blessed to be rich
and powerful were sacrificed on the altar of the marketplace.

The New
Hampshire-born Stone, grounded in rural New England conservatism and
Yankee thrift, was appalled by the orgy of greed and inequality
engineered by his fellow elites. He denounced a hedonistic culture
dominated by unethical oligarchs and corporations very similar to those
that exist today.

“Wealth, power,
the struggle for ephemeral social and political prestige, which so
absorb our attention and energy, are but the passing phase of every
age; ninety-day wonders which pass from man’s recollection almost
before the actors who have striven from them have passed from the
stage,” he wrote. “What is significant in the record of man’s
development is none of these. It is rather those forces in society and
the lives of those individuals, who have, in each generation, added
something to man’s intellectual and moral attainment, that lay hold on
the imagination and compel admiration and reverence in each succeeding
generation.”

Wall Street’s
crash in 1929 and the widespread suffering caused by the Depression
confirmed Stone’s fears about unfettered capitalism. Victorian-era
writer Herbert Spencer, who coined the term “survival of the fittest”
and whose libertarian philosophy was widely embraced in the 1920s,
argued that liberty was measured by the “relative paucity of restraint”
that government places on the individual. Stone saw this belief,
replicated in the ideology of neoliberalism, as a recipe for
corporate oppression and exploitation.

If the law
remained trapped in the agrarian, white male, slave-holding society in
which the authors of the Constitution lived, if it was used to
exclusively defend “individualism,” there would be no legal mechanisms
to halt the abuse of corporate power. The rise of modern markets,
industrialization, technology, imperial expansion and global capitalism
necessitated a legal system that understood and responded to modernity.
Stone bitterly attacked the concept of natural law and natural rights,
used to justify the greed of the ruling elites by attempting to place
economic transactions beyond the scope of the courts. Laissez faire
economics was not, he said, a harbinger of progress. The purpose of the
law was not to maximize corporate profit. In Stone’s reasoning, a clash
between the courts and the lords of commerce was inevitable.

Stone excoriated
the legal profession for its failure to curb the avarice of the “giant
economic forces which our industrial and financial world have created.”
Lawyers, he went on, were not supposed to be guardians of corporate
power. He asked why “a bar which has done so much to develop and refine
the technique of business organization, to provide skillfully devised
methods for financing industry, which has guided a world-wide
commercial expansion, has done relatively so little to remedy the evils
of the investment market; so little to adapt the fiduciary principle of
nineteenth-century equity to twentieth-century business practices; so
little to improve the functioning of the administrative mechanisms
which modern government sets up to prevent abuses; so little to make
law more readily available as an instrument of justice to the common
man.” The law, he said, was about “the advancement of the public
interest.” He castigated the educated elites, especially lawyers and
judges, who used their skills to become “the obsequious servant of
business” and in the process were “tainted with the morals and manners
of the marketplace in its most anti-social manifestations.” And he
warned law schools that their exclusive focus on “proficiency”
overlooked “the grave danger to the public if this proficiency be
directed wholly to private ends without thought of the social
consequences.” He lambasted “the cramped mind of the clever lawyer, for
whom intellectual dignity and freedom had been forbidden by the
interests which he served.” He called the legal profession’s service to
corporation power a “sad spectacle” and attorneys who sold their souls
to corporations “lawyer criminals.”

He was viciously
attacked. The Wall Street lawyer William D. Guthrie responded in the
Fordham Law Review, warning readers that Stone was peddling “subversive
doctrines” championed by “false prophets” that had as their goal
“national socialism, the repudiation of standards and obligation
heretofore upheld, the leveling of classes, the destruction of
property, and the overthrow of our federal system designed to be
composed of sovereign and indestructible states.”

But Stone
understood a seminal fact that eludes our day’s Federalist Society and
the Republican and Democratic party leaderships: Corporations cannot be
trusted with social and political power. Stone knew that the law must
be a barrier to the insatiable corporate lust for profit. If the law
failed in this task, then corporate despotism was certain.

He wrote of the
excesses of capitalism that led to the Depression:

"I venture to
assert that when the history of the financial era which has just drawn
to a close comes to be written, most of its mistakes and its major
faults will be ascribed to the failure to observe the fiduciary
principle, the precept as old as the holy writ, that “a man cannot
serve two masters.” More than a century ago equity gave a hospitable
reception to that principle, and the common law was not slow to follow
in giving it recognition. No thinking man can believe that an economy
built upon a business foundation can long endure without some loyalty
to that principle. The separation of ownership from management, the
development of the corporate structure so as to vest in small groups
control over the resources of great numbers of small and uniformed
investors, make imperative a fresh and active devotion to that
principle if the modern world of business is to perform its proper
function. Yet those who serve nominally as trustees, but relieved, by
clever legal devices, from the obligation to protect those whose
interests they purport to represent, corporate officers and directors
who award themselves huge bonuses from corporate funds without the
assent or even the knowledge of their stockholders, reorganization
committees created to serve interests other than those whose securities
they control, financial institutions which, in the infinite variety of
their operations, consider only last, if at all, the interests of those
whose funds they command, suggest how far we have ignored the necessary
implications of that principle. The loss and suffering inflicted on
individuals, the harm done to a social order founded upon business and
dependent upon its integrity, are incalculable."

The corporate
coup d’état Stone attempted to thwart is complete. His worst fears are
our nightmare.

Stone had his
flaws. After he refused to grant a stay of execution for Nicola
Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the two anarchists
were hanged in August 1927. (A courtier took a fishing boat to retrieve
the fateful decision that Stone made while he was at his vacation home
here on Isle au Haut. He probably signed off on their execution orders
on the table where I sit each morning.) He sometimes ruled against the
rights of unions. He endorsed the internment of Japanese-American
citizens during World War II. He was not sympathetic to conscientious
objectors except on religious grounds. He did not always protect the
constitutional rights of communists. He could use the law to curb what
he saw as Franklin Roosevelt’s consolidation of power within the
executive branch.

But Stone had
the integrity and courage to throw bombs at the establishment. He
attacked, for example, the Nuremberg Trials of the Nazi leadership
after World War II, calling it a “high-grade lynching party.” “I don’t
mind what he [the chief Nuremberg prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice
Robert H. Jackson] does to the Nazis, but I hate to see the pretense
that he is running a court and proceeding according to common law,” he
wrote. “This is a little too sanctimonious a fraud to meet my
old-fashioned ideas.” He noted acidly that the Nuremberg Trials were
being used to justify the proposition that “the leaders of the
vanquished are to be executed by the victors.”

Stone spent his
summers in a gray-shingled cottage with blue-green trim overlooking a
small island harbor. He and his wife built the cottage, which still
stands, in 1916. He tramped about the island in old clothes. One day at
the dock a woman mistook the Supreme Court justice for a porter. She
asked him to carry her bags. Stone, a burly man who had played football
in college, lifted the suitcases and followed her without a word.

Stone did not
possess the Emersonian brilliance and rhetorical flourishes of a Holmes
or the trenchant social analysis of a Brandeis, but he was an astute
legal scholar. There would be no place for him in today’s Republican or
Democratic parties or judiciary, seized by the corporate interests he
fought. The Federalist Society, along with corporate lobbyists, would
have mounted a fierce campaign to block him from becoming attorney
general and a Supreme Court justice. His iron fidelity to the rule of
law would have seen him, like Ralph Nader, tossed into the political
and judicial wilderness.

Stone opposed
socialism because, as he told his friend Harold Laski, the British
political philosopher and socialist, he believed the judicial system
could be reformed and empowered to protect the public from the tyranny
of corporate elites. If the judicial system failed in its task to
safeguard democracy, he conceded to Laski, socialism was the only
alternative.

On Contact with
Chris Hedges

Aug 5 -"....restoring America’s justice
system with legal scholar Edgar Cahn. Cahn is
a law professor, former counsel and speechwriter
to Robert F. Kennedy, and co-founder of the Antioch
School of Law which placed emphasis on serving the
poor and trained prospective lawyers in social
activism...." - Here**

July 31- "..... how corporations
have used their money
to take over the nonprofit organizations and regulatory
agencies that once protected the citizen from predatory
corporate practices ...." - Here**

"Donald Trump is on his version of a staycation,
chilling at his golf course resort in New Jersey and watching FOX News
or tweeting nonstop — when he’s not golfing or threatening nuclear war.
This week on Intercepted: As Erik Prince peddles his plan to privatize
the war in Afghanistan on major news networks, Jeremy gives an update
on the aftermath of Blackwater’s 2007 massacre of Iraqi civilians at
Nisour Square in Baghdad. Intercept reporter Lee Fang lays out how a
network of

libertarian think tanks called the
Atlas Network is insidiously shaping ideological and political
infrastructure across the world, especially in Latin America. As the
Trump administration has ratcheted up its hostile rhetoric toward
Venezuela, we speak with attorney and former Hugo Chavez adviser Eva
Golinger about the country’s political turmoil. And we
hear Claudia Lizardo of the Caracas-based band, La Pequeña
Revancha, talk about her music and hopes for Venezuela.”
Jeremy
Scahill

Donald
Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is
being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with
its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and
its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a
beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and
preparing to take power for decades. If the nation suffers another
economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic
domestic terrorist attack or a new war, President Trump’s ability to
force the Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut down dissent
will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had
81 percent of white evangelicals behind him.

Trump’s moves to restrict abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, permit
discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious liberty”
and allow churches to become active in politics by gutting the Johnson
Amendment, along with his nominations of judges championed by the
Federalist Society and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, have
endeared him to the Christian right. He has rolled back civil rights
legislation and business and environmental regulations. He has elevated
several stalwarts of the Christian right into power—Mike Pence to the
vice presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Justice Department, Neil Gorsuch
to the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom
Price to Health and Human Services and Ben Carson to Housing and Urban
Development. He embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American
chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger and racism that define
the Christian right.

More important, Trump’s disdain for facts and his penchant for magical
thinking and conspiracy theories mesh well with the worldview of the
Christian right, which sees itself as under attack by the satanic
forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal
establishment, Hollywood and the Democratic Party. In this worldview,
climate change is not real, Barack Obama is a Muslim and millions of
people voted illegally in the 2016 election.

The followers of the Christian right, like Trump and his brain trust,
including Stephen Bannon, are Manicheans. They see the world in black
and white, good and evil, them and us. Trump’s call in his speech in
Poland for a crusade against the godless hoards of Muslims fleeing from
the wars and chaos we created replicates the view of the Christian
right. Christian right leaders in a sign of support went to the White
House on July 10 to pray over Trump. Two days later Pat Robertson
showed up there to interview the president for his Christian
Broadcasting Network.
If the alliance between these zealots and the government succeeds, it
will snuff out the last vestiges of American democracy.

On the surface it appears to be incongruous that the Christian right
would rally behind a slick New York real estate developer who is a very
public serial philanderer and adulterer, has no regard for the truth,
is consumed by greed, does not appear to read or know the Bible,
routinely defrauds and cheats his investors and contractors, expresses
a crude misogyny and an even cruder narcissism and appears to yearn for
despotism. In fact, these are the very characteristics that define most
of the leaders of the Christian right. Trump has preyed on desperate
people through the thousands of slot machines in his casinos, his sham
university and his real estate deals.

Megachurch pastors prey on their followers by extracting “seed
offerings,” “love gifts,” tithes and donations and by selling miracle
healings along with “prayer clothes,” self-help books, audio and video
recordings and even protein shakes. Pastors have established within
their megachurches, as Trump did in his businesses, despotic fiefdoms.
They cannot be challenged or questioned any more than an omnipotent
Trump could be challenged on the reality television show “The
Apprentice.” And they seek to replicate their little tyrannies on a
national scale, with white men in charge.

The personal piety of most of the ministers who lead the Christian
right is a facade. Their private lives are usually marked by hedonistic
squalor that includes mansions, private jets, limousines, retinues of
bodyguards, personal assistants and servants, shopping sprees, lavish
vacations and sexual escapades that rival those carried out by Trump.
And because they run “churches,” in many cases church funds pay for
their tax-free empires, including their extravagant lifestyles. They
also engage in the nepotism found in the Trump organization, elevating
family members to prominent or highly paid positions and passing on the
businesses to their children.

The Christian right’s scandals, which give a glimpse into the sordid
lives of these multimillionaire pastors, are legion. Jim and Tammy Faye
Bakker’s Praise the Lord Club, for example, raked in as much as $1
million a week before Jim Bakker went to prison for nearly five years.
He was convicted of fraud and other charges in 1989 because of a $158
million scheme in which followers paid for vacations that never
materialized. As the Bakker empire came apart, there also were
accusations of drug use and rape. Tammy Faye died in 2007, and now Jim
Bakker is back, peddling survival food for the end days and telling his
significantly reduced television audience that anyone who opposes Trump
is the Antichrist.

Paul and Jan Crouch, who gave the Bakkers their start, founded Trinity
Broadcasting, the world’s largest televangelist network, now run by
their son Matt and his wife, Laurie. Viewers were encouraged to call
prayer counselors at the toll-free number shown at the bottom of the TV
screen. It was a short step from talking with a prayer counselor to
making a “love gift” and becoming a “partner” in Trinity Broadcasting
and then sending in more money during one of the frequent
Praise-a-Thons.

The Crouches reveled in tasteless kitsch, as does Trump. They sat
during their popular nightly program in front of stained glass windows
that overlooked Louis XVI-inspired sets awash in gold rococo and red
velvet, glittering chandeliers and a gold-painted piano. The network
emblem, which Paul Crouch wore on the pocket of his blue
double-breasted blazer, featured a crown, a lion, a horse, a white
dove, a cross and Latin phrases among other elements. The Crouches
would have been at home in Trump Tower, where the president has a faux
“Trump crest”—allegedly plagiarized—and has decorated his penthouse as
if it was part of Versailles.

The Crouches were masters of manipulation. They exhorted viewers
to
send in checks for $1,000, even if they could not afford it. Write the
check anyway, Paul Crouch, who died in 2013, told them, as a “step of
faith” and the Lord would repay them many times over. “Do you think God
would have any trouble getting $1,000 extra to you somehow?” he asked
during one Praise-a-Thon broadcast. Viewers, many of whom struggled
with deep despair and believed that miracles and magic alone held them
back from the abyss, often found it impossible to resist this emotional
pressure.

Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is home to many of the worst
charlatans in the Christian right, including the popular healer Benny
Hinn, who says that Adam was a superhero who could fly to the
moon and
claims that one day the dead will be raised by watching TBN from

inside
their coffins. Hinn claims his “anointings” have cured cancer, AIDS,
deafness, blindness and numerous other ailments and physical injuries.
Those who have not been cured, he says, did not send in enough money.

These religious hucksters
are some of the most accomplished con artists
in the country, a trait they share with the current occupant of the
Oval Office. I wrote a book on the Christian right in 2007 called
“American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I did
not use the word “fascist” lightly. I spent several hours, at the end
of two years of reporting, with two of the country’s foremost scholars
on fascism—Fritz Stern and Robert O. Paxton. Did this ideology fit the
parameters of classical fascism? Was it virulent enough and organized
enough to seize power? Would it go to the ruthless extremes of previous
fascist movements to persecute and silence dissent? Has our
deindustrialized society replicated the crippling despair, alienation
and rage that always feed fascist movements?

The evangelicalism promoted
by the Christian right is very different
from the evangelicalism and fundamentalism of a century ago. The
emphasis on personal piety that defined the old movement, the call to
avoid the contamination of politics, has been replaced by Christian
Reconstructionism, called Dominionism by some. This new ideology is
about taking control of all institutions, including the government, to
build a “Christian” nation. Rousas John Rushdoony in his 1973 book,
“The Institutes of Biblical Law,” first articulated it. Rushdoony
argued that God gives the elect, just as he gave Adam and Noah,
dominion over the earth to build a Christian society. Their state will
come about with the physical eradication of the forces of Satan. It is
the duty of the church and the elect to “rescue” the world so Christ
can return.

This is an ideology of
death. It promises that the secular, humanist
society will be physically destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form
the basis of our legal system. Creationism or “Intelligent Design” will
be taught in public schools. People who are considered social deviants,
including homosexuals, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews,
Muslims, criminals and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning
Christians who do not embrace the Christian right’s perverted and
heretical interpretation of the Bible—will be silenced, imprisoned or
killed. The role of the federal government will be reduced to
protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. Church
organizations will be funded and empowered by the government to run
social-welfare agencies. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and
sinfulness, will be denied government assistance. The death penalty
will be expanded to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy,
blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be
treated as murder.

Women will be subordinate
to men. Those who practice
other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens and eventually
outcasts. The wars in the Middle East will be defined as religious
crusades against Muslims. There will be no separation of church and
state. The only legitimate voices will be “Christian.” America will
become an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities will
be branded as agents of Satan.

Tens of millions of
Americans are already hermetically sealed within
this bizarre worldview. They are given a steady diet of conspiracy
theories and lies on the internet, in their churches, in Christian
schools and colleges and on Christian television and radio. Elizabeth
Dilling, who wrote “The Red Network” and was a Nazi sympathizer, is
required reading.

Thomas Jefferson, who
favored separation of church
and state, is ignored. This Christian propaganda hails the “significant
contributions” of the Confederacy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led the
anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, is rehabilitated as an
American hero. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with the wars in
Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, is defined as part of the
worldwide battle against satanic Islamic terror. Presently, nearly 40
percent of the U.S. public believes in Creationism or “Intelligent
Design.” And nearly a third of the population, 94 million people,
consider themselves evangelical.

Those who remain in a
reality-based
universe often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons. They do not take
seriously the huge segment of the public, mostly white and working
class, who because of economic distress have primal yearnings for
vengeance, new glory and moral renewal and are easily seduced by
magical thinking. These are the yearnings and emotions Trump has
exploited politically.Those who embrace this
movement need to feel, even if they are not,
that they are victims surrounded by dark and sinister groups bent on
their destruction. They need to elevate themselves to the role of holy
warriors, infused with a noble calling and purpose. They need to
sanctify the rage and hypermasculinity that are the core of fascism.
The rigidity and simplicity of their belief, which includes being
anointed for a special purpose in life by God, are potent weapons in
the fight against their own demons and desire for meaning.

“Evil when we are in its
power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,” Simone
Weil wrote.

These believers, like all
fascists, detest the reality-based world.
They condemn it as contaminated, decayed and immoral. This world took
their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It
doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids,
pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence,
deprivation and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair,
they suddenly discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save
them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them.
God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to
be rich, powerful and happy.

The rational, secular
forces, those that speak in the language of fact
and evidence, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers
back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The
magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who
flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that
supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate
these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through
good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem. They need to
live in a society that is not predatory but instead provides
well-funded public schools, free university education and universal
health care, a society in which they and their families can prosper.Let us not stand at the
open gates of the city waiting passively for
the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching towards Bethlehem.
Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us openly defy the
liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for
economic reparations for the poor and the working class. Let us give
all Americans a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out.
If we do not act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses,
waving American flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the pledge
of allegiance, united behind the ludicrous figure of Donald Trump, will
ride this rage to power.

Donald
Trump’s election to the presidency has prompted an outpouring of
protest and activism from millions of people, including many who had
not been politically engaged before. But what will it take for “the
resistance” to not only defeat Trump but push forward a transformative
agenda to address the multiple crises of our time?

In her best-selling new book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock
Politics And Winning The World We Need, Naomi Klein draws from her
previous books on corporate branding, the politics of climate change
and the history of neoliberal elites around the world using moments of
profound crisis to advance unpopular policies. With hindsight, her work
over the past two decades anticipates in many ways the rise of a
rightwing reality television star who wants to dismantle democratic
institutions and burn as much fossil fuels as possible.

“It’s like bad fiction it’s so obvious,” Klein told The Indypendent.

In No Is Not Enough, she doesn’t shy away from showing how Trump
emerged from a decaying political culture to seize power, or warning
that the worst is yet to come. But she refuses to wallow in despair,
arguing instead that the oppositional forces conjured up by Trump have
a unique opportunity to build a much more just and humane world than
anything we have seen before — provided we fight not only what we’re
against but what we’re for. This interview has been condensed and
lightly edited for length and clarity.

JOHN
TARLETON: This book begins with a
scene from the
night of Trump’s election in which you are meeting with a group of
prominent activists in Australia. The meeting gradually runs out of
steam as people in the room watch the election results come in over
their phones. Can you describe how you got from that moment of shock
and horror to producing this book, which is ultimately quite hopeful?

NAOMI KLEIN: (Laughs) Slowly, I would say. I think that
day the only emotion I could compare Trump’s election to was a feeling
that many of us involved in the anti-corporate globalization movement
had after 9/11. We had been part of this movement where there was a lot
of forward momentum and a deepening of analysis and an opening of new
political spaces, and then just this kind of instant feeling that all
of those spaces were going to be shut down. A lot of us projected that
political moment into Trump’s election. But, I think we gave him more
power than he actually has.

There are a lot of political spaces where it is possible for progress
to happen whether at the sub-national level in the United States,
internationally or just in movement spaces. I think there was a slow
process of realizing that this did not necessarily have to be a repeat
of a closing off political progress. There are ways in which the
assumption that from now on we’re only playing defense is true and
unavoidable, but there are also ways in which it is not necessarily the
case. transcript
continued

Glenn
Greenwald for Jeremy ScahillAudio >>Week
Twenty-four*<<"Glenn Greenwald on the
New Cold War" - With all the constant hype about Russia, you’d think we were
living in a new Cold War.

"WITH
ALL THE constant hype about Russia, you’d think we were living in a new
Cold War. This week on Intercepted: Glenn Greenwald fills in for Jeremy
Scahill, and we take a deep dive into the origins and evolution of the
Trump-Russia story. Fox News’s Tucker Carlson and Glenn find something
they can actually agree on (the Democratic establishment’s

Russia
hysteria), but diverge on Tucker’s coverage of
immigration and crime. Glenn responds to stories by Peter Beinart and
Jeet Heer. And Russian-American writer Masha Gessen explains how
conspiracy thinking is a mirror of the leaders we put in power, and why
it’s so tempting — and dangerous — to believe in simplistic reasons for
Trump’s election.” Glenn Greenwald for
Jeremy Scahill

TERRE
HAUTE, Ind.—Eugene Victor Debs, whose home is an infrequently visited
museum on the campus of Indiana State University, was arguably the most
important political figure of the 20th century. He built the socialist
movement in America and was eventually crucified by the capitalist
class when he and hundreds of thousands of followers became a potent
political threat.

Debs burst onto the national stage when he organized a railroad strike
in 1894 after the Pullman Co. cut wages by up to one-third but did not
lower rents in company housing or reduce dividend payments to its
stockholders. Over a hundred thousand workers staged what became the
biggest strike in U.S. history on trains carrying Pullman cars.
The response was swift and brutal.

“Mobilizing all the powers of capital, the owners, representing
twenty-four railroads with combined capital of $818,000,00, fought back
with the courts and the armed forces of the Federal government behind
them,” Barbara W. Tuchman writes in “The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the
World Before the War, 1890-1914.”

“Three thousand police in the Chicago area were mobilized against
the strikers, five thousand professional strikebreakers were sworn in
as Federal deputy marshals and given firearms; ultimately six thousand
Federal and State troops were brought in, less for the protection of
property and the public than to break the strike and crush the union.”

Attorney General Richard Olney, who as Tuchman writes “had been a
lawyer for railroads before entering the Cabinet and was still a
director of several lines involved in the strike,” issued an injunction
rendering the strike illegal. The conflict, as Debs would write, was a
battle between “the producing classes and the money power of the
country.”

Debs and the union leaders defied the injunction. They were arrested,
denied bail and sent to jail for six months. The strike was broken.
Thirty workers had been killed. Sixty had been injured. Over 700 had
been arrested. The Pullman Co. hired new workers under “yellow dog
contracts,” agreements that forbade them to unionize.

When he was in jail, Debs read the works of socialist writers Edward
Bellamy and Karl Kautsky as well as Karl Marx’s “Das Kapital.” The
books, especially Marx’s three volumes, set the “wires humming in my
system.”

“I was to be baptized in Socialism in the roar of the conflict. … [I]n
the gleam of every bayonet and the flash of every rifle the class
struggle was revealed,” he writes. “This was my first practical lesson
in Socialism.”

Debs came to the conclusion that no strike or labor movement could
ultimately be successful as long as the government was controlled by
the capitalist class. Any advances made by an organized working class
would be reversed once the capitalists regained absolute power, often
by temporarily mollifying workers with a few reforms. Working men and
women had to achieve political power, a goal of Britain’s Labour Party
for workers at the time, or they would forever be at the mercy of the
bosses.

Debs feared the rise of the monolithic corporate state. He foresaw that
corporations, unchecked, would expand to “continental proportions and
swallow up the national resources and the means of production and
distribution.” If that happened, he warned, the long “night of
capitalism will be dark.”

This was a period in U.S. history when many American Christians were
socialists. Walter Rauschenbusch, a Christian theologian, Baptist
minister and leader of the Social Gospel movement, thundered against
capitalism. He defined the six pillars of the “kingdom of evil” as
“religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the
corruption of justice, the mob spirit (being ‘the social group gone
mad’) and mob action, militarism[,] and class contempt.”

Debs turned to the Bible as often to Marx, arguing “Cain was the author
of the competitive theory” and the “cross of Jesus stands as its
eternal denial.” Debs’ fiery speeches, replete with words like “sin”
and “redemption,” were often thinly disguised sermons. He equated the
crucified Christ with the abolitionist John Brown. He insisted that
Jesus came “to destroy class rule and set up the common people as the
sole and rightful inheritors of the earth.” “What is Socialism?” he
once asked. “Merely Christianity in action.” He was fond of quoting the
poet James Russell Lowell, who writes:

He’s true to God who’s true to man;
Whenever wrong is done.
To the humblest and the weakest,
’neath the all-beholding sun.
That wrong is also done to us,
And they are slaves most base,
Whose love of right is for themselves
And not for all the race.

It was also a period beset with violence, including anarchist bombings
and assassinations. An anarchist killed President William McKinley in
1901, unleashing a wave of state repression against social and radical
movements. Striking workers engaged in periodic gun battles, especially
in the coalfields of southern West Virginia, with heavily armed company
goons, National Guard units, paramilitary groups such as the Coal and
Iron Police, and the U.S. Army.

Debs, although a sworn enemy of the capitalist elites, was adamantly
opposed to violence and sabotage, arguing that these actions allowed
the state to demonize the socialist movement and enabled the
destructive efforts of agents provocateurs. The conflict with the
capitalist class, Debs argued, was at its core about competing values.
In an interview conducted while he was in jail after the Pullman
strike, he stressed the importance of “education, industry, frugality,
integrity, veracity, fidelity, sobriety and charity.”

We have to begin all over again. And we must do so understanding, as
Debs did, that any accommodation with members of the capitalist class
is futile and self-defeating. They are the enemy. They will degrade and
destroy everything, including the ecosystem, to get richer.

They are not capable of reform.
I walked through the Debs home in Terre Haute with its curator, Allison
Duerk. It has about 700 visitors a year. Rarely do these visits include
school groups. The valiant struggle by radical socialists and workers,
hundreds of whom were murdered in labor struggles, has been consciously
erased from our history and replaced with the vacuity of celebrity
culture and the cult of the self.

“Teaching this kind of people’s history puts a lot of power in
working-class people’s hands,” Duerk said. “We all know what that
threatens.”
The walls of the two-story frame house, built by Debs and his wife in
1890, are covered with photos and posters, including pictures of Debs’
funeral on the porch and 5,000 mourners in the front yard. There is the
key to the cell in which he was held when he was jailed the first time.
There is a photo of Convict No. 9653 holding a bouquet at the entrance
to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta as he accepts the nomination
from leaders of the Socialist Party to be their 1920 presidential
candidate. There are gifts including an intricately inlaid wooden table
and an ornately carved cane that prisoners sent to Debs, a tireless
advocate for prisoner rights.

I opened the glass panel of a cherry wood bookshelf and pulled out one
of Debs’ books, running my fingers lightly over his signature on the
front inside flap. I read a passage from a speech he gave in 1905 in
Chicago:

The capitalist who does no useful work has the economic power to take
from a thousand or ten thousand workingmen all they produce, over and
above what is required to keep them in working and producing order, and
he becomes a millionaire, perhaps a multi-millionaire.

He lives in a palace in which there is music and singing and
dancing and the luxuries of all climes. He sails the high seas in his
private yacht. He is the reputed “captain of industry” who privately
owns a social utility, has great economic power, and commands the
political power of the nation to protect his economic interests. He is
the gentleman who furnishes the “political boss” and his swarm of
mercenaries with the funds with which the politics of the nation are
corrupted and debauched. He is the economic master and the political
ruler and you workingmen are almost as completely at his mercy as if
you were his property under the law.

I leafed through copies of Appeal to Reason, the Socialist party
newspaper Debs edited, which once had almost 800,000 readers and the
fourth highest circulation in the country.

Debs, like many of his generation, was literate. He read and reread
“Les Misérables” in French. It was his father’s bible. It became his
own. His parents, émigrés from Alsace, named him after the French
novelists Eugene Sue and Victor Hugo. His father read Sue, Hugo,
Voltaire, Rousseau, Dumas and other authors to his six children. Debs
found in Hugo’s majestic novel the pathos of the struggle by the
wretched of the earth for dignity and freedom. He was well aware, like
Hugo, that the good were usually relentlessly persecuted, that they
were not rewarded for virtue and that those who held fast to truth and
justice often found their way to their own cross. But there was no
other choice for him: The kingdom of evil had to be fought. It was a
moral imperative. It was what made us human.
“Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material
improvement,”

Hugo writes in an appendix to “Les Misérables.” “Knowledge is a
viaticum; thought is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like
wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines
away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for
stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of
bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light.” A
life of moral probity was vital as an example in the
face of capitalist exploitation, but that was not enough to defeat the
“kingdom of evil.” The owners and managers of corporations, driven by
greed and a lust for power, would never play fair. They would always
seek to use the law as an instrument of oppression and increase profits
through machines, a reduction in wages, a denial of benefits and union
busting. They would sacrifice anyone and anything—including democracy
and the natural world—to achieve their goals.

Debs, if he could hear today’s proponents of the “free market,”
self-help gurus, positive psychologists, talk show hosts and the
political class as they exhort Americans to work harder, get an
education, follow their dreams, remain positive and believe in
themselves and American exceptionalism, would have scoffed in derision.
He knew that

corporate power is countered only through organized and
collective resistance by workers forced to fight a bitter class war.

Debs turned to politics when he was released from jail in 1895. He was
one of the founders of the Socialist Party of America and, in 1905, the
Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or “Wobblies.” He was the
Socialist Party candidate for the U.S. presidency five times in the
period 1900 through 1920—once when he was in prison—and he ran for
Congress in 1916.

Debs was a powerful orator and drew huge crowds across the country.
Fifteen thousand people once paid 15 cents to a dollar each to hear him
in New York City’s Madison Square Garden. In his speeches and writings
he demanded an end to child labor and denounced Jim Crow and lynching.
He called for the vote for women, a graduated income tax, unemployment
compensation, the direct election of senators, employer liability laws,
national departments of education and health, guaranteed pensions for
the elderly, nationalization of the banking and transport systems, and
replacing “wage slavery” with cooperative industries.

As a presidential campaigner he traveled from New York to California on
a train, called the Red Special, speaking to tens of thousands. He
helped elect socialist mayors in some 70 cities, including Milwaukee,
as well as numerous legislators and city council members. He propelled
two socialists into Congress. In the elections of 1912 he received
nearly a million votes, 6 percent of the electorate. Eighteen thousand
people went to see him in Philadelphia and 22,000 in New York City.

He terrified the ruling elites, who began to institute tepid reforms to
attempt to stanch the growing support for the socialists. Debs after
the 1912 election was a marked man.

On June 18, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, he denounced, as he had often done
in the past, the unholy alliance between capitalism and war, the use of
the working class by the capitalists as cannon fodder in World War I
and the Wilson administration’s persecution of anti-war activists,
unionists, anarchists, socialists and communists. President Woodrow
Wilson, who had a deep animus toward Debs, had him arrested under the
Sedition Act, which made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write,
or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about
the form of the Government of the United States” or to “willfully urge,
incite, or advocate any curtailment of the production” of anything
“necessary or essential to the prosecution of [a U.S. war, in this case
against Germany and its allies].”

Debs did not contest the charges. At his trial, he declared:
“Washington, Paine, Adams—these were the rebels of their day. At first
they were opposed by the people and denounced by the press. … And if
the Revolution had failed, the revolutionary fathers would have been
executed as felons. But it did not fail. Revolutions have a habit of
succeeding when the time comes for them.”

On Sept. 18, 1918, minutes before he was sentenced to a 10-year prison
term and stripped of his citizenship, the 62-year-old Debs rose and
told the court:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings,
and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on
earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I
am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while
there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I listened to all that was said in this court in support and
justification of this prosecution, but my mind remains unchanged. I
look upon the Espionage Law as a despotic enactment in flagrant
conflict with democratic principles and with the spirit of free
institutions. …

Your Honor, I have stated in this court that I am opposed to the social
system in which we live; that I believe in a fundamental change—but if
possible by peaceable and orderly means. …

Standing here this morning, I recall my boyhood. At fourteen I went to
work in a railroad shop; at sixteen I was firing a freight engine on a
railroad. I remember all the hardships and privations of that earlier
day, and from that time until now my heart has been with the working
class. I could have been in Congress long ago. I have preferred to go
to prison. …

I am thinking this morning of the men in the mills and the factories;
of the men in the mines and on the railroads. I am thinking of the
women who for a paltry wage are compelled to work out their barren
lives; of the little children who in this system are robbed of their
childhood and in their tender years are seized in the remorseless grasp
of Mammon and forced into the industrial dungeons, there to feed the
monster machines while they themselves are being starved and stunted,
body and soul. I see them dwarfed and diseased and their little lives
broken and blasted because in this high noon of Christian civilization
money is still so much more important than the flesh and blood of
childhood. In very truth gold is god today and rules with pitiless sway
in the affairs of men.

In this country—the most favored beneath the bending skies—we have vast
areas of the richest and most fertile soil, material resources in
inexhaustible abundance, the most marvelous productive machinery on
earth, and millions of eager workers ready to apply their labor to that
machinery to produce in abundance for every man, woman, and child—and
if there are still vast numbers of our people who are the victims of
poverty and whose lives are an unceasing struggle all the way from
youth to old age, until at last death comes to their rescue and lulls
these hapless victims to dreamless sleep, it is not the fault of the
Almighty: it cannot be charged to nature, but it is due entirely to the
outgrown social system in which we live that ought to be abolished not
only in the interest of the toiling masses but in the higher interest
of all humanity. …

I believe, Your Honor, in common with all Socialists, that this nation
ought to own and control its own industries. I believe, as all
Socialists do, that all things that are jointly needed and used ought
to be jointly owned—that industry, the basis of our social life,
instead of being the private property of a few and operated for their
enrichment, ought to be the common property of all, democratically
administered in the interest of all. …

I am opposing a social order in which it is possible for one man who
does absolutely nothing that is useful to amass a fortune of hundreds
of millions of dollars, while millions of men and women who work all
the days of their lives secure barely enough for a wretched existence.

This order of things cannot always endure. I have registered my protest
against it. I recognize the feebleness of my effort, but, fortunately,
I am not alone. There are multiplied thousands of others who, like
myself, have come to realize that before we may truly enjoy the
blessings of civilized life, we must reorganize society upon a mutual
and cooperative basis; and to this end we have organized a great
economic and political movement that spreads over the face of all the
earth.

There are today upwards of sixty millions of Socialists, loyal, devoted
adherents to this cause, regardless of nationality, race, creed, color,
or sex. They are all making common cause. They are spreading with
tireless energy the propaganda of the new social order. They are
waiting, watching, and working hopefully through all the hours of the
day and the night. They are still in a minority. But they have learned
how to be patient and to bide their time.

They feel—they know, indeed—that the time is coming, in spite of
all
opposition, all persecution, when this emancipating gospel will spread
among all the peoples, and when this minority will become the
triumphant majority and, sweeping into power, inaugurate the greatest
social and economic change in history.

In that day we shall have the universal commonwealth—the harmonious
cooperation of every nation with every other nation on earth. …

Your Honor, I ask no mercy and I plead for no immunity. I realize that
finally the right must prevail. I never so clearly comprehended as now
the great struggle between the powers of greed and exploitation on the
one hand and upon the other the rising hosts of industrial freedom and
social justice.

I can see the dawn of the better day for humanity. The people are
awakening. In due time they will and must come to their own.

When the mariner, sailing over tropic seas, looks for relief from his
weary watch, he turns his eyes toward the southern cross, burning
luridly above the tempest-vexed ocean. As the midnight approaches, the
southern cross begins to bend, the whirling worlds change their places,
and with starry finger-points the Almighty marks the passage of time
upon the dial of the universe, and though no bell may beat the glad
tidings, the lookout knows that the midnight is passing and that relief
and rest are close at hand. Let the people everywhere take heart of
hope, for the cross is bending, the midnight is passing, and joy cometh
with the morning.

Three years later, Debs’ sentence was commuted by President Warren
Harding to time served, and, in broken health, he was released from
prison in December of 1921. His citizenship was not restored until five
decades after his 1926 death. The labor movement and socialist party he
had struggled to build had been ruthlessly crushed, often through
violent attacks orchestrated by the state and corporations and mass
arrests and deportations carried out during the Palmer Raids in
November 1919 and January 1920. The government had shut down socialist
publications, such as Appeal to Reason and The Masses. The “Red Scare”
was used as an ideological weapon by the state, and especially the FBI
after it was established in 1908, to discredit, persecute and silence
dissent.

The breakdown of capitalism saw a short-lived revival of
organized
labor during the 1930s, often led by the Communist Party, and during a
short period after World War II, and this resurgence triggered yet
another prolonged assault by the capitalist class.

We have returned to an oligarchic purgatory. Wall Street and the global
corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the war industry,
have iron control over the government. The social, political and civil
rights won by workers in long and bloody struggles have been stripped
away. Government regulations have been rolled back to permit
capitalists to engage in abuse and fraud. The political elites, along
with their courtiers in the media and academia, are hapless corporate
stooges. Social and economic inequality replicates the worst excesses
of the robber barons. And the great civic, labor and political
organizations that fought for working men and women are moribund or
dead.

HOTTEST June on record2nd HOTTEST all-time high temperature
on record7th hottest any month on record31st June with no measurable rain at
official site

All-time consecutive day streaks
broken:
Highs of 115°+: 3 days (June 19-21; old record 2 days in 1994, June
28-29)
Highs of 114°+: 3 days (June 19-21; old record 2 days in 1994, June
28-29)
Lows of 83°+: 5 days (June 22-26; old record 4 days last occurring in
2016, July 15-16)
Lows of 82°+: 7 days (June 20-26; old record 4 days last occurring in
2016, July 15-16)
Lows of 81°+: 7 days (June 20-26; old record 5 days occurring in 2010,
June 29 to July 3)
Lows of 80°+: 9 days (June 20-28; old record 8 days occurring in 1990,
June 24 to July 1)

All-time consecutive day streaks tied:
Highs of 113°+: 3 days (June 19-21; tied with 1994, June 24-26)
Lows of 84°+: 2 days (June 22-23; tied with six other occasions, last
in 2010, July 9-10)
Lows of 79°+: 10 days (June 20-29; tied with 1995, August 1-10)

All-time hottest high temperature
time periods broken (out to 7 days):
3 days: 115.3° (June 19-21; old record 114° on three occasions, last in
1994, June 27-29)

All-time warmest average temperature
time periods broken (out to 7 days):
1 day: 101.5° (June 20; old record 99° in 1990, June 27)
2 days: 100° (June 20-21; old record 98.8° in 1990, June 26-27)
3 days: 99.2° (June 20-22; old record 98.3° in 1990, June 26-28)
4 days: 98.6° (June 20-23; old record 97.9° in 1990, June 25-28)
5 days: 98.5° (June 20-24; old record 97.4° in 1990, June 24-28)
6 days: 98.6° (June 20-25; old record 97.2° in 1990, June 25-30)
7 days: 98.1° (June 20-26; old record 97° in 1994, June 24-30)

"In their daily update on the festival, the Forest
Service reported that more than 2,600 people already
had converged on the Malheur National Forest in eastern Oregon. As many
as 20,000 campers
are expected for the July 1-7 event - Here

Jeremy
ScahillWeek
Twenty*"The House of Trump"Mehdi Hasan, sitting in for Jeremy Scahill

"THE
ROYAL FAMILY of the United States takes some heat as the fate of
American health care hangs on a few votes. President Trump once said
that when it comes to health insurance, he would cover everyone. He
lied. Meanwhile the crown prince of America, Jared Kushner, and
Mohammed Bin Salman, crown prince of Saudi Arabia, play house with
foreign policy. This week on the podcast: Intercept columnist and Al
Jazeera host Mehdi Hasan fills in for Jeremy Scahill. With the Muslim
travel ban heading to the Supreme Court,
Intercept reporter Murtaza Hussain and

Palestinian
author and journalist Rula Jebreal discuss the global consequences of
the House of Trump’s meddling in the Middle East. British historian Tom
Holland joins Mehdi for a heated debate on the role of Islam within the
Islamic State — is religion the motivation behind terrorist attacks, or
is it merely used as a justification after the fact? Plus, actor Bill
Camp reprises his role as the “SIGINT Philosopher,” the failed novelist
turned newsletter columnist for the NSA, and answers an ethical
question. Spoiler: It involves Captain Jack Sparrow.
" - Jeremy Scahill

"Shock.
It’s a word that has come up a lot since November— for obvious reasons.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about shock. Ten years ago, I
published “The Shock Doctrine,” an investigation that spanned four
decades from Pinochet’s U.S.-backed coup in 1970s Chile to Hurricane
Katrina in 2005.

I noticed a brutal and recurring tactic by right wing governments.
After a shocking event – a war, coup, terrorist attack, market crash or
natural disaster – exploit the public’s disorientation. Suspend
democracy. Push through radical “free market” policies that
enrich the
1 percent at the expense of the poor and middle class.

The administration is creating chaos. Daily. Of course many of the
scandals are the result of the president’s ignorance and blunders – not
some nefarious strategy.

But there is also no doubt that some savvy people around Trump are
using the daily shocks as cover to advance wildly pro-corporate
policies that bear little resemblance to what Trump pledged on the
campaign trail.

And the worst part? This is likely just the warm up.

We need to focus on what this Administration will do when it has a
major external shock to exploit.

Maybe it will be an economic crash like 2008. Maybe a natural disaster
like Sandy. Or maybe it will be a horrific terrorist event like
Manchester or Paris in 2015.

Any one such crisis could redraw the political map overnight, giving
Trump and his crew free rein to ram through their most extreme ideas.

But here’s one thing I’ve learned over two decades of reporting from
dozens of crises around the world: these tactics can be resisted.

And for your convenience, I’ve tried to boil it down to a 5-step plan."
- Naomi Klein
Adapted from Naomi Klein’s new book, No Is Not Enough: Resisting
Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, published by
Haymarket Books. www.noisnotenough.org

"No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump's Shock Politics" - Here** &
"The Worst Is Yet to
Come
with Trump, So We Must Be Ready for Shock Politics" - Here**
- An hour with Naomi Klein

"We
must embrace a
despair that unflinchingly acknowledges the bleak future that will be
created by climate change. We must see in any act of resistance, even
if it appears futile, a moral victory. African-Americans understand, in
a way perhaps only the oppressed can grasp, that our character and
dignity will be measured by our ability to name and resist the
malignant forces that seem to hold us in a death grip. Catastrophic
climate change is inevitable. Our technology and science will not save
us. The future of humanity is now in peril. At best, we can mitigate
the crisis. We cannot avert it. We are fighting for our lives. If we do
not rapidly build militant movements of sustained revolt, movements
willing to break the law and attack the structures of the corporate
state, we will join the 99.9 percent of species that have vanished
since life first appeared on earth.

“In
these circumstances refusing to accept that we face a very unpleasant
future becomes perverse,” Clive Hamilton writes in “Requiem for a
Species.” “Denial requires a willful misreading of the science, a
romantic view of the ability of political institutions to respond, or
faith in divine intervention.”

Tens
of millions of human beings, especially in the global south, are being
herded into the climate furnaces for immolation. And we in the north
are soon to follow. The earth’s temperature has already risen by more
than 1 degree Celsius since the late 19th century. And it is almost
certain to rise a few more degrees—even if we stop all carbon emissions
today. The last time the earth’s temperature rose 4 degrees, the polar
ice caps disappeared and the seas were hundreds of feet above their
current levels.

“[Climate
change] is interacting with two previously existing crises,” Christian
Parenti, author of “Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New
Geography of Violence,” told me in an interview. “On the one hand, the
legacy of neoliberal economic restructuring has weakened states in the
global south so they don’t have the capacity to pave the roads, educate
the population, to help farmers who are in distress. On the other hand,
much of the global south is littered with cheap weapons and veterans of
previous conflicts who know how to use those cheap weapons. In this
comes the extreme weather of climate change. [In] states that have been
systematically reduced to the point where they can’t respond even if
they wanted to, how do people adapt to climate change? How do they
adapt to the drought and floods? Very often, you pick up surplus
weaponry. You go after your neighbor’s cattle. Or you blame it on your
neighbor’s ideology or ethnicity. Underneath a lot of these ethnic and
religious conflicts we see there is a climate element.”

“The
great danger in climate change is that at a certain point [you will
see] the collapse of natural ecosystems, the dying of tropical forests,
which are currently carbon sinks—they pull CO2 out of the atmosphere,”
Parenti said. “But if they die and all that wood burns or rots, they
can become net emitters of greenhouse gases. There are the huge
deposits of methane, frozen methane in the Arctic. These are already
beginning to come out.”

“The
fear is that at a certain point we cross the line and there’s a tipping
point,” he said. “The primary cause of greenhouse gas emissions will
become the breakdown of these natural systems, and then it really is
out of our control.”

We
have
the technology to build alternative energy and food systems, but the
fossil fuel industry, the most powerful industry in the world, has
blocked all meaningful attempts to curb fossil fuel extraction and
reduce energy consumption. And meat, dairy and egg producers,
responding to consumer demand, are responsible for the emission of more
greenhouse gases than the entire global transportation sector.
Livestock generates enormous amounts of methane, which is 86 times more
destructive than CO2. Livestock also produces 65 percent of nitrous
oxide resulting from human activity, a gas that has 296 times the
“Global Warming Potential” of carbon dioxide. The massive animal
agriculture industry, like the fossil fuel industry, receives billions
of dollars in subsidies from the U.S. government. And corrupt and
pliant politicians who do the bidding of these industries receive
millions in return from lobbyists. It is legalized bribery. And it
won’t stop until this political system is destroyed.

The
nonprofit Project Drawdown, which compiles research from an
international coalition of scientists, says that “a plant-based diet
may be the most effective way an individual can stop climate change.”
Adopting such a diet should be our first act of revolt. The second
should be carrying out civil disobedience to disrupt the extraction of
fossil fuels, along with massively reducing our consumption of those
fuels. The third, through mass mobilization, should be to overthrow the
corporate state and nationalize the energy sector, the banking
industry, utilities and public transportation in addition to
dismantling a war machine that in waging futile and unwinnable wars
consumes nearly half of all government expenditures. It is a lot to
demand. But if we do not succeed, the human race will disappear.

Governments,
if they were instruments of the common good, would end subsidies to the
fossil fuel and animal agriculture industries, retrofit government
vehicles and buildings to use clean energy, ban the fossil fuel and
animal agriculture industries from public lands, end the
externalization of the true costs of these industries, and impose taxes
so heavy that extraction of fossil fuels would be unprofitable and the
purchase of animal food products economically unsustainable—just as
those foods are environmentally unsustainable. But with state power
being held captive by corporations, short-term profit takes precedence
over human health and even human survival.

“The
technology exists to strip CO2 out of the atmosphere,” Parenti said.
“The problem is it’s extremely expensive. And how do you store it? As a
gas, it can leak out. But it can also be turned into basically baking
soda. But the costs are so expensive. So this technology currently
exists. It’s proprietary. Private companies are using it to facilitate
further oil extraction. If civilization was serious about survival,
governments will seize or buy that technology. Make it open source. And
invest in whatever was necessary to strip CO2 out of the atmosphere
artificially, along with [extraction by] plants and forests etcetera.”

Parenti
stressed that collapse will be defined not only by rising temperatures
but a series of social and infrastructure failures. It will be
nonlinear. He noted that food prices, including the prices for basic
grains, surged shortly before the 2010-2013 uprisings known as the Arab
Spring.

“You
had the Black Sea drought, affecting grain harvest in Russia, Ukraine
and Kazakhstan,” he said. “This ripples through world markets. Bread
prices spike in Tunisia and Egypt. People are out in the street
protesting this mukhabarat [secret police] state they’ve lived in for
30 years. But it’s also about the price of bread. That’s one way that a
climate crisis appears. It doesn’t appear like a climate crisis at
first. You have to think about the interconnections of the world
economy.”

The
civil war in Syria was preceded in 2006 by the worst drought in 900
years, as well as an austerity program that weakened government support
systems. Farmlands were transformed into arid dust bowls. Livestock
perished. Food prices skyrocketed. Over 1.5 million desperate people
from the countryside fled to urban areas, many packing themselves into
the shantytowns and slums set up by refugees during the war in Iraq.
And into the chaos walked Islamic State. The war, which has taken half
a million lives, created 4.8 million refugees and internally displaced
7 million people in Syria. The refugee crisis that resulted in Europe
is the worst since the end of World War II. The influx to Europe has
empowered nationalist and protofascist movements and touched off a rise
in hate crimes. Climate change is the unseen hand in unrest, social
disintegration, chaos and war.
“At one level, this is a war about ethnicity and religion and opposing
the foreign occupation,” Parenti said of the war in Afghanistan. “But
on another level, this is about farmers who are dealing with the worst
drought in living memory, which is occasionally punctuated by extreme
flooding, growing the only crop they can grow in those
conditions—[heroin] poppies. The poppy happens to use about one-fifth
or one-sixth the amount of water that wheat and other traditional
Afghan crops use. So farmers have to grow poppy if they’re going to
survive. Which side of the conflict will help them do that? The
Taliban. There are subtle and important interconnections to all ongoing
conflicts.”

“In
India, you have the Naxalites, a Maoist guerrilla movement that has
been going for over 40 years,” he said. “It progresses with the
drought. District by district, where there is drought, there are
Naxalites. The key there is the state has withdrawn from the credit
markets. Farmers have to go to moneylenders. The moneylenders will only
lend them money to grow cotton because they can’t eat cotton. The more
money they borrow, the worst the drought, the more the cotton is
produced, and the lower the cotton price will go. You have mass
suicides. You can imagine if you’re a farmer on the verge of drinking
poison to kill yourself, and the Naxalites come along and say, ‘Hey
look, we have a short-term and a long-term solution for your problems.
The short-term is when the moneylender comes to town you stop his car
and we kill him. When the cops come, we ambush them. In the long term,
it will be better.’ ”
Failed states, proliferating in Latin America, Asia, Africa and the
Middle East, are ruled by phantom governments.

“There’s
a mythology of the central state that operates when the police stop you
and demand some paperwork,” Parenti said of failed states. “But really,
there is no central database. [These are the] twitching limbs severed
from a spider. These offices are used for basic survival. They can hold
up travelers and demand a $50, $100 bribe from them in the name of some
centralized state that did, in fact, exist 10, 20, 30 years ago. That’s
a part of how states fail—the corruption and re-privatization of the
means of administration and the means of repression. [Max] Weber’s
argument is [that] the modern state is about detaching the leader of a
bureaucracy from the ownership of a bureaucracy. State failure begins
with the re-privatization of the bureaucracies, particularly the
repressive bureaucracies of the police and military.”

“In a
place like Afghanistan, cops pay to have those jobs,” he said. “They
pay the head cops. They pay the dues so they can shake down traffic on
the roads. That’s spreading all over the world. Its uniforms, insignia,
paperwork, ministries and officialdom all exist, but exist for the
personal gain of whoever is wearing that uniform.”

“The
possibility of a progressive, civil, left politics is curtailed in a
world where drug-addled teenagers run the checkpoints,” he said.
“That’s really important to keep in mind. Then the immediate response
in the West is to justify further military intervention, which in every
case is the immediate cause, or trigger, of state collapse. Of course,
there are older, deeper problems that set it up. Libya is a perfect
example. The NATO bombing campaign created that failed state. Iraq is a
semi-failed state. Yemen is a semi-failed state. Half of Syria is a
failed state. U.S. and Western intervention has been pretty
instrumental in a lot of that. The great irony is there’s further
justification for an overdeveloped military. That’s bad for democratic
politics here.”

“In
the long run, it won’t work,” he warned. “The process of state failure
spreads and spreads. What we see in response is also a hardening of
democratic regimes in the north. We’ve got xenophobic politics in the
U.S. Southwest in response to a migration crisis [and that kind of
politics also] is happening in Europe across the Mediterranean. There
are all sorts of great humanitarian responses. But there’s also a very
clear shift to the right. France has this state of emergency that’s
still in effect. Right-wing politics are doing well all across Europe.
One of the great dangers of state failure in the global south in the
short term is the hardening and drift towards increasingly
authoritarian, xenophobic, quasi-fascist type of politics in the global
north and developing states.”

On
one July night in 1977 the power went out in New York City. There were
citywide riots. Arsonists started 1,037 fires. Looters smashed their
way into 1,616 stores. There was over $300 million in damage. This
Hobbesian nightmare will become normal in more and more parts of the
globe as we traverse the sixth great mass extinction, brought on by the
activity of human beings.
The greatest existential crisis of our time is to at once accept the
tragic reality before us and find the courage to resist. It is to
acknowledge that the world as we know it will become harsher and more
difficult, that human suffering will expand, but that we can, if we
fight back, perhaps reconfigure our lives and our society to mitigate
the worst savagery, dramatically reduce our carbon footprint and save
ourselves from complete annihilation. The power elites will do nothing
to save us.

“To
be
hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic,” historian Howard
Zinn wrote. “It is based on the fact that human history is a history
not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage,
kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will
determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity
to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so
many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy
to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a
world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a
way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is
an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human
beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself
a marvelous victory.”

The
inability to see what is in front of our eyes replicates the blindness
of all past civilizations that celebrated their eternal glory at
moments of precipitous decline. The difference is that life across the
whole planet will go down this time. It is comforting to pretend this
is not happening, to foster false hopes and fool ourselves with the
myth of human progress, but these illusions only tranquilize us at a
moment when we should be rising in collective fury against those who
are orchestrating our doom."

The
following segment is excerpted from “The Putin Interviews,” a
transcript of a series of discussions between filmmaker Oliver Stone
and President Vladimir Putin conducted in Russia over nine days between
July 2, 2015 and Feb. 10, 2017. The excerpt below is from the “Fourth
Interview,” which took place on Feb. 10. This excerpt is reprinted by
arrangement with Skyhorse Publishing. Coutesy of Truthdig - Here~ Forward by TD editor and chief Bob
Scheer - Here

On Syria and Defense:

OS: Can we quickly get back—in the matter of Syria, it seems to have
quieted down. The showing of Aleppo was much-played-up in the Western
media as barbaric. And I’ve seen the RT reports from a different
perspective about what was happening there in West Aleppo—a different
sense of, where the US media was not reporting some of the atrocities
that were happening in Aleppo.

VP: You know, this is all part of an information confrontation.
Certainly the media are used. If they present lopsided information,
they discredit themselves in the end. In any case, when a question
arises inevitably, if people are taken hostage by terrorists does it
mean that we have to stop fighting terrorists? Should we just give them
a blank check to do whatever they please? The question always arises—is
the source of this evil the ones who fight terrorists or the terrorists
themselves? Just have a look—there has been much talk about the need to
provide immediate humanitarian aid to Aleppo. Right now, Aleppo has
been liberated of terrorists. And no one talks right now about the need
to provide humanitarian aid to Aleppo, even though security and safety
have been ensured there. Many partners of mine, my colleagues were
telling me that they were willing, they were ready to provide that kind
of humanitarian aid, but so far nothing has happened. There were always
those who said that we would be in conflict with the Sunni world sooner
or later. I think this is, to me, a provocation. Many in the Arab
world, and in Turkey, they do understand what our intentions are. There
are those who disagree with that. But our position is clear. Our goal
is to support the legitimate authorities, to prevent a disintegration
of the Syrian statehood, otherwise this territory is going to be yet
another Libya or worse. Or another Somalia. Secondly, our goal is to
fight terrorism. And this is no less important to us. Just as I said,
according to our data, 4,500 people from Russia and around 5,000
citizens from Central Asian countries—the former Soviet republics—are
fighting there. And our task is to prevent them from coming home.
Nonetheless, it is with respect that we treat the concerns of our
partners from Turkey and from the Arab countries. What did it result
in? First, at the final stage of the fight for liberating Aleppo, this
stage didn’t end with hostilities. No, it ended with separating the
forces. And we helped part of the armed opposition to evacuate from
Aleppo. And we were the ones to facilitate this process. We were the
ones to organize all of that. But everyone just made it look like they
didn’t see what was happening. Secondly there were talks that once
Aleppo was liberated, ethnic or religious cleansings would take place
there. Do you know what decision I took? I decided to dispatch a
battalion of Russia military police to Aleppo, from the Northern
Caucasus, mostly from the Chechen Republic and a number of other
republics in the Northern Caucasus. Incidentally, all of them are Sunni.

OS: [laughter] I see.

VP: And the local population gave them a very warm welcome. They see
them as their protectors. Certainly we did that with the concern and
with the support of President Assad. He said he was interested in
fostering a dialogue between different religious groups. Do you know
what it led to? I’m going to tell you something that no one is aware of
so far, but probably they are going to learn that before your film
appears. The representatives of the armed opposition in one of the
suburbs of Aleppo asked us to increase the number of our military
policemen. They want us to bring this number to a great number in the
regions they control. A week ago I decided to dispatch another
battalion of military police there. But this is not all there is to it.
Together with our military police, a Mufti from the Chechen Republic
has appeared there. He is also a Sunni. He talks to our military, to
the local population. We’re not interested in adding fuel to this
conflict. Quite the contrary, we are interested in fostering dialogue,
so as to preserve the territorial integrity of this country which is a
very complicated matter. I’m particularly concerned about what we are
witnessing. We see some sort of a divide of different religious groups.
People are moving from one part of Syria to another. These religious
groups are isolating themselves and separating, and this is very
dangerous because it might result in a split. But I’ve got to tell you
that we are successful because we’ve got the direct support of the
Turkish leadership, as well as the leadership of Iran. This is a very
difficult matter and it’s not always easy to find consensus. But direct
contacts are being upheld with the Iranian partners and the Turkish
partners, and this is what gives us hope and that is why we achieve
success. What you’ve said about Syria quieting down, that is true.
Indeed, hostilities have all but ceased between the armed opposition
and the armed forces of the government. But hostilities are still
ongoing against Daesh, the Islamic State.

OS: What would you say is the result of the Russian military
intervention—in a few words?

VP: I can sum that up very easily. First, we’ve stabilized the
legitimate authorities. Secondly, we have achieved a reconciliation and
we’ve managed to bring to one negotiating table both the Armed
opposition and the government. And we’ve managed to foster a dialogue
in a trilateral format which engages both Turkey and Iran. We need the
support of the United States as well as the support of Saudi Arabia,
Jordan, Egypt. We’re going to tread very cautiously. So that each step
secures what has been achieved at the previous step instead of
undermining it.

OS: Again, what was the distance between Damascus and Moscow. You told
me once it was kilometers . . .

VP: Well I never counted. I think 3,000. 2,000 to Sochi, another
thousand to Istanbul. 3,500 or 4,000 kilometers.

OS: Okay. And one quick question. I mean, I definitely get the feeling
from what you said that Mr. Erdogan in Turkey feels that the US CIA was
involved in the coup d’état against him recently.

VP: Did he tell you that?

OS: No. He said things that hinted at it—in that direction.

VP: I don’t know anything about that. But I can see the rationale
behind what he said. Mr. Gülen, whom he suspects of organizing this
coup d’état, is living in Pennsylvania and he’s lived there for more
than nine years.

OS: And Mr. Erdogan never said anything to you, he never whispered . .
. ?

VP: No, he told me that he suspected Gülen and his organization, his
movement, of organizing that coup d’état. He has never told me anything
about the role of the United States. But I can see his logic—you can
guess it. If indeed Mr. Gülen had taken part in this coup d’état
attempt—of which I have no idea—it would be very hard to imagine that
at least the intelligence services of the US would be unaware of what
was happening. That’s the first thing. Secondly, the Air Force
stationed at the Incirlik Air Base has been active in this coup d’état
attempt. And that is exactly the air base where the main part of the
American Air Force that is stationed in Turkey is located. We are a
little bit concerned. And why is that? The thing is, tactical nuclear
weapons are deployed in Turkey, US nuclear weapons. And when such
dramatic events occur, the question arises as to what might happen to
the nuclear warheads.

OS: Well, if the army is loyal to Erdogan, then I’m not sure. A lot of
them are involved with the United States.

VP: Well, probably you know better than I do.

OS: Well, he rounded up a lot of military people.

VP: You know, Mr. Erdogan was one step from being assassinated. He
moved from the hotel where he was staying. Some of his security
officers were staying there. And one of the Special Forces, a commando
from the armed forces came to him, there was a clash with his security
officers and his security officers were killed. I think we can say that
if Erdogan had stayed there than he would have been assassinated. These
are just bare facts from which I infer no conclusions whatsoever. But
this is what happened. I do not want either to analyze or give an
assessment to what he did afterwards. But we know the historical role
that the armed forces have been playing in Turkey. They’ve been the
grantor of a secular avenue of development in the country. We’ve got
this Golden Rule which we stick to—we never interfere within the
domestic affairs of any country.

OS: Not even the US election?

VP: No, never. It’s up to the people of the country.

OS: I believe you.

VP: You know, even earlier, sometimes half as a joke, half on a serious
note, we were saying that the American Constitution was not perfect.

OS: The Electoral College.

VP: Yes, absolutely right. Because the elections are not that direct.
There was this electoral college that you mentioned. But their response
was always, “This is none of your business. We’re going to sort it out
ourselves.” So we do not interfere, either within the domestic affairs
of the US or any other country. We have not interfered in Turkey.

OS: How close were you to a war—the United States said to Syria you
crossed the red line in 2013 and General Shoygu, your Defense Minister
said the Syrians were about to launch a massive attack of 624 cruise
missiles within 24 hours. And it probably would have ended the
sovereignty of the Syrian state at that point, when Obama said they
crossed a red line, and you were involved with that, in stopping that
and in removing the gases, the chemical weapons from Syria. How close
was it? And were you worried about a US strike on Damascus?

VP: Honestly, I don’t know—I think you’ve got to ask the Obama
administration about that, about how close they were to the brink of
war, to making that decision. Another decision finally was made,
luckily.

OS: You were involved in it.

VP: Yes, I was, when the G20 Summit took place in St. Petersburg,
President Obama and I, we talked about this topic. And we agreed to try
to take steps to eliminate the remains of chemical weapons in Syria.

OS: You sound very casual. It doesn’t sound right. I mean, if Shoygu
said 24 hours, you guys have to be worried about it. This is your ally.

VP: Well, it’s all about the subjunctive mood, so to speak. Be that as
it may, both I and President Obama agreed to work together back then,
and luckily our joint work resulted in success.

OS: Well, you make it sound casual, but weren’t you worried that your
ally would disappear and maybe ISIS was going to get all the way to
Damascus right then and there? Didn’t you see all the implications of
this?

VP: Yes, certainly we were concerned. And that’s why we talked about
how we could address that matter with other means and we were
successful in doing that.

OS: You seem very cool about it, but I would imagine in that time
period it might have been much tenser.

VP: Look, what happened back then happened back then. And right now we
have a very well-organized and well-performing system of air defense
deployed there.

OS: Ah!

VP: —We have the S-400, with a range of more than 300 kilometers,
S-3000, also with a range of 300. The DEBO system with a range of 60
kilometers. And there are other systems that are more efficient in the
shorter range. So we’ve got a multi-tier plan for air defense. And
there are also the ships stationed off the coast that all also have
this system of air defense.

OS: So you could have prevented it?

VP: And the most sophisticated air defense systems with a range of 300
kilometers.

OS: Well that’s some conversation you’re having with Obama—you’re
saying Russian weapons are going to shoot down US weapons and you’ll
have an international crisis. It’ll be quite a situation. The Pentagon
is going to go wild, no? You know, this is close to war.

VP: Back then, we didn’t have those missiles in Syria.

OS: Oh, I thought you did.

VP: Our missiles were not active in Syria back then.

OS: Well, you had a long-term alliance with them since the early 1970s?

VP: Yes, but we didn’t take any part in what was happening there. We
were just providing medical and technical military assistance to them,
financial assistance.

OS: So, in other words, if the Assad regime had been, let’s say,
weakened, would Russia have come to help it against an ISIS move
towards Damascus?

VP: This once again depends on the subjunctive mood, and it’s difficult
to talk about, because it’s all about myriads of factors that have to
be taken into account.

OS: Let’s talk about another war situation since we’re in the Situation
Room. More recent. In the Crimea, when the referendum was coming up,
the US destroyer Donald Cook was moving towards the Black Sea with
Tomahawk missiles. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I saw a documentary . .
. Well, first of all, NATO announced military drills in the Black Sea
and the Russian naval commander was talking about how close—in this
documentary—was talking about how close Russia came to using its
missile system for coastal defense. The US ship Donald Cook was
apparently coming right into the Black Sea when it made a U-turn and
didn’t carry through its mission. It seems like it was similar to the
Cuban Missile Crisis when the same thing happened, where a ship was
coming towards the demarcation line and made a U-turn because it had
been threatened by the US Navy back in 1962. So where were you at this
time when this Donald Cook situation was happening and were you nervous
about his?

VP: Remember how the Ukrainian crisis unfolded. [We’ve discussed it.]
The three foreign ministers of European countries were acting as
guarantors of an agreement between the opposition and President
Yanukovych. Everyone agreed to that. President Yanukovych even agreed
to hold early elections. At that time, at the initiative of the United
States of America, they told us, ‘We ask you to prevent President
Yanukovych from using the armed forces.’ And they promised in their
term they were going to do everything for the opposition to clear the
squares and the administrative buildings. We said, ‘Very well that is a
good proposal. We are going to work on it.’ And as you, know President
Yanukovych didn’t resort to the armed forces. But the very next day the
coup d’état took place during the night. We didn’t have a telephone
conversation, we didn’t get a call, we simply saw them [the Americans]
actively support those who perpetrated the coup d’état. And we could
only shrug our shoulders. Such conduct, the way the Americans acted,
even among individuals is absolutely unacceptable. They should have at
least told us afterwards that the situation had spun out of control.
They should have told us that they would do everything to put them back
on a constitutional track. No, they didn’t do that. They started to
come up with lies saying that Yanukovych had fled. And they supported
those who performed that coup d’état. How can we trust such partners?

OS: Question—is this when Victoria Nuland, the Undersecretary of State,
had that conversation with the American ambassador and said, “Fuck the
EU”?

VP: Well, it doesn’t matter, honestly. It was on February 21st. Or
maybe the 20th. The coup d’état took place the next day. So now that
Crimea has become a full fledged part of the Russian Federation, our
attitude towards it changed drastically. If we see a threat to our
territory, just as any other country, we will have to protect it by all
means at our disposal. I wouldn’t draw an analogy with the Cuban
Missile Crisis, because back then the world was on the brink of a
nuclear apocalypse. Thankfully, the situation didn’t go as far this
time, even though we did indeed deploy our most sophisticated, our
cutting-edge systems, for coastal defense.

OS: But the Bastion is a big missile and the destroyer, the Donald
Cook, has Tomahawk missiles.

VP: Yes, certainly—against such missiles as the ones we’ve deployed in
Crimea—such a ship, destroyer as Donald Cook is simply defenseless.

OS: Yes, that’s probably why they turned around?

VP: I think this captain was smart and also a responsible person. This
doesn’t mean
he’s weak . . .

OS: No, no.

VP: —He simply understood what he was dealing with. He decided not to
continue.

OS: But your commander had the authority to fire?

VP: Our commanders always have the authorization to use the necessary
means for the defense of the Russian Federation.

OS: Still, it’s a big incident potentially.

VP: Yes, certainly. It would have been very bad.

OS: Were you notified?

VP: Yes, certainly. Where is that ship stationed usually—the Donald
Cook? Where is the base?

OS: The Mediterranean, I presume.

VP: Yes. But I think that the mother port is somewhere in the United
States—the place it’s registered. So, thousands and thousands of
kilometers from. . . . And even if the port is somewhere in the
Mediterranean, somewhere in Spain, it is still thousands of kilometers
from the Black Sea. And we are determined to protect our territory.

OS: I understand. But were you available, were you—

VP: Who was trying to provoke whom? What was that destroyer doing so
close to our
land?

OS: I understand, but were you contacted at the time? In what timeframe
did all of this take place, this challenge?

VP: I think it was real time. Once the destroyer was located and
detected, they saw that there was a threat, and the ship itself saw
that it was the target of the missile systems. I don’t know who the
captain was. But he showed much restraint. I think he is a responsible
man and a courageous officer to boot. I think it was the right decision
that he made. He decided not to escalate the situation. It doesn’t at
all mean that he would have been attacked by our missiles. But we had
to show them that our coast was protected by the missile systems

OS: Was there a warning sent out to him?

VP: The captain sees right away that his ship has become the target of
missile systems—there is special equipment. He has special equipment to
detect such situations.

OS: And all of this takes place in two minutes, 30 minutes, 50 minutes?

VP: I don’t know—the experts can give you the answer. Seconds, mere
seconds, I
think.

OS: I mean, does this happen all the time? You sound very cool.

VP: It sometimes happens. And that’s why our American counterparts have
suggested we should build a system for exchanging information about the
aircraft that are flying over, so as to avoid any kind of incident.
Because when an aircraft is targeted, is eradiated by another aircraft
this is considered a serious incident.

OS: I’d say.

VP: And this is always a very serious incident.

OS: So there have been others—there have been other incidents we don’t
know about?

VP: I don’t know. NATO aircraft are flying over the Baltic Sea without
transponders—the systems that are used to identify them—and our
aircraft have started to fly without our transponders as well. And once
our aircraft have started to do that, there’s been so much ruckus
saying that we do not use transponders, but when I publicly declared
that the number of our flights is many-fold fewer than the number of
NATO flights the ruckus has quieted down. The president of Finland has
proposed that we should make a decision making it obligatory for
everyone to use these transponders, to detect them, to identify and we
suggested right away that this should be done, but our NATO partners
have refused. You see we need a dialogue all the time, we do not need
new provocations.

OS: I understand, it’s very scary. At that time, you made a strong
speech, I thought, addressing NATO. You said, “This is our historic
territory. These are Russian people. They are in danger now. We can’t
leave them alone. It wasn’t us who staged the coup. It was done by
nationalists and people with far-right views. You supported them, but
where do you live—5,000 miles away. But we live here and it is our
land. What do you want to fight for there? You don’t know, do you? But
we do know. And we are ready for it.”

VP: Yes indeed we were brought to the brink, so to speak.

OS: To the brink—you admit to the brink?

VP: Yes, certainly. We had to respond somehow.

OS: Well, finally you’re admitting it.

VP: Yes, we were open to positive dialogue. We did everything to
achieve a political settlement. But they had to give their support to
this unconstitutional seizure of power. I still wonder why they had to
do that. Incidentally, that was a first step to further destabilization
of the country. And this happens still. So, first the power is seized
and right now these forces that have seized power are trying to make
those who disagree with that accept this as a fact. This is what is
happening to the south and eastern part of Ukraine. Instead of engaging
in a political dialogue, which is quite possible, that is what they’re
doing.

OS: Well, you have to get your story out there. Your side of the
story—not only on RT, but hopefully with some intelligence releases,
some shots, some images that would tell the story. You have to tell
this story, you have to somehow get your raw intelligence into the
system.

VP: You see, that’s quite impossible, because this point of view that
we present is ignored by the world media. And if it’s ignored, not on
equal footing with the other perspectives, then almost no one hears it.
So a narrative is being constructed of some evil Russia—

OS: —I wouldn’t give up on that, I wouldn’t give up. You have to fight
back. And you’re doing a great job but more, better.

VP: Well, this is not up to him. This is not the task he’s supposed to
do.

OS: I know.

VP: His task is to provide information and support to my everyday
functions. . . . It’s my job and I’m not doing a very good job of it.

OS: You’re doing a great job, but you work too hard—you’ve got to
relax. I think you should take a vacation. Go to Palm Beach, relax, sit
on the beach, play some golf, talk.

VP: I understand the hint. Well, I envy him.

OS: In closing, you inherited a Russian state that was collapsing at
the end of the last century. You came to office accidentally and people
were in great misery. There was no sense of a central power and the
point is that I think Russia had to be rebuilt so that it wouldn’t
collapse again. Mr. Gorbachev’s ideal of restructuring didn’t happen.
The West, in a sense, supported disorder. A vision which, you said,
Russia must never again embrace. Then you said sovereignty is the key.
Sovereignty is the key. I believe you said one time that a state in
order to exist and have sovereignty has, amongst its obligations, to
pay the pensions of older people. Yes?

VP: Yes, certainly. In general, and especially right now, a country can
only ensure its sovereignty if it secures a good economic growth
rate—not just the economic growth rate, you’ve got to secure economic
development. And in this sense, despite the good assessment you’ve
given to my job, I think both myself and my colleagues could have done
an even better job. Even though that would have been immensely hard,
because we were always facing a dilemma. We had to choose between a bad
decision and an even worse decision. But that happens all the time
everywhere. You are always faced with a choice. And you’ve got to make
it. Liberally-minded people think that we should have taken harsher,
tougher measures. I thought that the harshness had to correlate to the
standard of living to help people. We had to go step by step in
improving the lives of our people. Back then, in 2000, more than 40
percent of our citizens were living below the poverty line, the system
of social security was in ruin, let alone the armed forces which all
but ceased to exist. Separatism was holding sway. I’m not going to
elaborate on that, but I’m going to say that the Russian constitution
didn’t apply all throughout our territory and the Caucasus was seeing a
war that was raging—a civil war, which was fueled by radical elements
from abroad. And in the end that civil war degenerated into terrorism.
The situation was very difficult. But the Russian people and all the
peoples of Russia, they’ve got a very important quality and that is
love for their own nation, for their country. The sense of danger, the
sense of compassion as well as the willingness to make sacrifices for
the interests of their country. And thanks to these qualities of the
Russian people and other peoples of Russia, we have managed to get
through that difficult period. But we cannot exploit these qualities
endlessly. We want our people to have better lives. Liberal-minded
economists say we should have economized more or we shouldn’t have
increased the wages, the salaries, the pensions. But you see our people
still have a very, very modest standard of living. I want rank and file
citizens, families to see that our country is recovering. Anyhow, we
are trying to pursue a very restrained, reserved economic policy.

OS: Getting back to sovereignty.

VP: We are trying to use the revenues from oil and gas. We will save
this money, but we try to spend what we get from other sectors. For us
that is a very difficult task. As you can see we have increased the
real income of our population by a magnitude of several times. Last
year, because of high inflation, real income was reduced a little bit.
But at the end of last year we saw a pickup of that real income. Last
year we managed to reduce the inflation rate to a historical record
low—it was 5.4 percent or so. Even though our target was 6.2 percent.
And we’re going to target inflation and I do hope that we’ll be able to
bring it down to four percent. We’ve got a relatively low unemployment
rate at around 5.4 percent. In spite of all the political restrictions,
we’ve managed to keep our reserves, to stabilize our economy. I’m
confident that this year we’re going to witness more economic growth,
albeit modest. Our monetary policy is very well-balanced. It’s being
implemented by the Central Bank and by the government.

OS: You should thank Obama—sanctions were good for
you.

VP: Our agricultural producers have to thank the Obama administration.
Due to the measures we’ve introduced to counter the sanctions against
us. These countermeasures are mostly related to closing our market to
agricultural produce. And thanks to these measures, the agricultural
producers have managed to increase annually their production by more
than three percent. Last year we saw record crops of wheat and other
grains. And I know you love Russia, so it gives me great pleasure to
tell you that Russia ranks first in the world in terms of wheat export.

OS: I like bread—the black bread is my favorite.

VP: We used to buy grains and wheat.

OS: From Canada, yeah.

VP: Right now we produce less than the US or Canada or China. But these
countries have larger consumption rates. And as far as per capita
production is concerned, it’s very good.

OS: I believe you. Sovereignty is not just economic though. I just want
to tell you a quick story—last night . . . I mean the Russian people
have guts. And last night there was a TV series on television Channel
1, I think it was. I saw it—prime time, 8 p.m. It was about the Germans
and the Russians. And it was a very interesting story. It was in
Russian. I didn’t understand much. But I got a sense of it. In that
story, the Russians again behaved very courageously, very courageous
and were very good fighters, and outwitted the Nazis. And you know, TV
stuff, but it was damn good. It was well-made. The actors were really
terrific. It was kind of ugly in a way, but in a good way—gritty. Very
impressed and I remembered when I was here during the Brezhnev era,
when they used to show all the old black and white Soviet films on TV,
I saw the same kind of movie where the Soviets were taking on the Nazis
again. And I made the connection. This is 34 years later, and I say the
Russian people have a certain quality of courage which manifests itself
time and again and they never forget. And by watching these old movies
and remembering the tradition, remembering history, you go a long way
towards keeping that sovereignty.

VP: Yes. That is very important. But no less important than this rigid
framework of tradition is to be willing to accept new things,
novelties, and to advance.

OS: Like cyber warfare! I’m not going to bug you anymore. I’ve got my
hands full, 25–30 hours to cut. No more questions! Promise. A handshake
across the countries. I wish I wish I wish. You did a great job, you
did a good job.

VP: [a warm handshake] If they’re going to beat you for this, you can
come back here
to Russia and we’ll help heal you.

OS: We’ll see. I’m proud of the film. You got to tell your side of the
story and that’s
all I can do.

"DONALD
TRUMP HAS made crystal clear that he has a great affinity for strongmen
and for unquestioned loyalty of those who work for him. This week on
Intercepted: Trump’s besties in Saudi Arabia convinced him that Qatar,
the host of U.S. Central Command, is the premiere Arab nation
sponsoring terrorism. Amnesty International’s Sherine Tadros and Al
Jazeera’s Mehdi Hasan analyze the hypocrisy-laden,
bizarre crisis. We also

discuss the
rise of Jeremy Corbyn. Jeremy addresses the Justice Department’s
allegations about The Intercept’s recent NSA story and the prosecution
of the alleged leaker. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes talks Russia, Trump, the
media and his new book, “A Colony in a Nation.” DJ Spooky joins the
conversation and imagines a Trump-inspired mash-up of Dante’s Inferno
and Disco Inferno." - Jeremy Scahill

"Jared Kushner is
sort of like Donald Trump’s less savvy version of Don Corleone’s
consigliere. But did he make the Russians an offer they couldn’t
refuse? This week on Intercepted: The scandal spotlight shines on
Trump’s influential (and strangely quiet) son-in-law as questions
abound over Kushner’s alleged meetings with Russian officials to
establish secret back channel communications. We talk to amateur punk
rocker turned national security correspondent Spencer Ackerman

of The Daily Beast. Organizer
and scholarMariame Kaba offers a
people’s history of prisons in the U.S. and the politicians — both
Democrats and Republicans — who have made them what they are today. And
we hear an incredible rendition of “The Partisan” from composers and
musicians Leo Heiblum of Mexico and Tenzin Choegyal of Tibet. They met
this week at the home of legendary composer Philip Glass and perform
for the first time together on Intercepted."
- Jeremy Scahill

"The
Israeli writer and dissident Uri Avnery asked an Egyptian general how
the Egyptians managed to surprise the Israelis when they launched the
October 1973 war. The general answered: “Instead of reading the
intelligence reports, you should have read our poets.”

The deep malaise, rage and feelings of betrayal that have enveloped
American society are rarely captured and almost never are explained
coherently by the press. To grasp the savage economic and emotional
cost of industrialization, the destruction of our democratic
institutions, the dark undercurrent of nihilistic violence that sees us
beset with mass shootings, the attraction of opioids, the rise of the
militarized state and the concentration of national wealth in a tiny
cabal of corrupt bankers and corporations, it is necessary to turn to a
handful of poets, writers and other artists. These artists, who often
exist on the margins of mass culture, are our unheeded prophets.

“What Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and most other prophets have
in common is a strong ethical outlook and a heightened sensitivity to
attitudes and morals—the obvious ones as well as those that lurk
beneath the surface,” the painter Enrique Martinez Celaya said in an
essay. “They also share urgency. Prophets are not inclined to wait for
the right time. Their prophetic vision demands action, leaving little
room for calculation and diplomacy. Truth, for the prophets, is not
merely a belief but a moral imperative that compels them to speak and
act with little regard for convenience or gains. But prophets need to
do more than speaking and acting, and it is not enough to be
apocalyptic. Something must be brought forward.”" [continued]

"The
idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot
generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot
economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social
service programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis
of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air,
slash jobs and depress wages. Idiot bankers gamble on self-created
financial bubbles and impose crippling debt peonage on the citizens.
Idiot journalists and public intellectuals pretend despotism is
democracy. Idiot intelligence operatives orchestrate the overthrow of
foreign governments to create lawless enclaves that give rise to
enraged fanatics. Idiot professors, “experts” and “specialists” busy
themselves with unintelligible jargon an ....."

"The
Cathedral of St. John the Divine is pleased to
host Creative Time and the New York Public Library for In Situ: How to
Reasonably Believe in God. The talk will feature Iranian-American
artist Shirin Neshat and Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek,
moderated
by Sister Helen Prejean. A performance by Reverend
Billy and the Stop
Shopping Choir will kick off the event." - Here**

Water Protectors
Called Back!- Here"Groups and individuals are already moving to
support the new wave of #NoDAPL action. Following
Trump’s memorandums, a group of U.S. veterans launched a fundraiser for the water protectors."

Tales of a feast on Plymouth plantation in the
Autumn of 1621, where of pilgrims from the Mayflower, celebrated the
harvest, shared and broke bread with the first Americans are false.
They are still used as inspiration and shared with children, teaching
them the beauty of gratitude.

But it is now widely understood this
Thanksgiving story is a fictional history. It was invented to whitewash
the vicious genocide wrought upon the native inhabitants of this
magnificent continent. Not only did the Europeans try to eradicate
native populations, but they made every effort to eviscerate their
culture, their language and eliminate them from these coveted lands.

From Plymouth Rock to Standing Rock, this lie
has made our Thanksgiving Day a Day of Mourning for the First Nations,
all the tribes big and small, those who came before us.

A few weeks ago we traveled to visit the
Standing Rock Sioux In North Dakota. We arrived at this unprecedented
historical gathering of over five hundred tribes and thousands of
others standing on the front lines to protect water, to state the most
basic human truth, to say water is life. Despite the painful history,
today they fight peacefully for us all.

The camp grows as winter comes. Standing in
protection of our most vital life support systems, but also for the
rightful preservation of Native American cultural ways and their
sovereignty. Everyone we talk with is committed to peaceful resistance.
Weapons alcohol and drugs are forbidden there.

Standing together in prayer to protect water
displays a deeply rooted awareness of life's interconnected nature, and
of the intrinsic value and import of traditional ways. This growing
movement stems from love, it is the most human instinct to protect that
which we love. An eager and engaged youth are at the core of this
pipeline route resistance, learning from a population of elders who
pass down unforgotten knowledge.

It is an awakening. All here together, with
their non-native relatives, standing strong in the face of outrageous,
unnecessary and violent aggression, on the part of militarized local
and state law enforcement agencies and National Guard, who are
seemingly acting to protect the interests of the Dakota Access Pipeline
profiteers, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of tax-payer dollars,
above all other expressed concerns. They stand against corporate
security forces, the county sheriff and the National Guard. Standing
while being hit with water cannons, mace, tear gas, rubber bullets.
Standing without weapons and praying, the water protectors endure human
rights abuses in sub freezing temperatures. Supplies arrive from all
over as the social media universe shares the heartbreaking news to the
world, that an American corporate media is not free to report. Thus, it
is the ugliness of corporate America, seen around the world.

But they stand, their hair frozen from water
cannons. They stand for all that is good and they stay strong.

We are calling upon you, President Barack
Obama, to step in and end the violence against the peaceful water
protectors at Standing Rock immediately.

We will be going back to support the water
protectors again.
Let us all stand with them in thanks, in appreciation for the ancient
wisdom they carry, In thanks for this opportunity for true gratitude.
For giving us a path forward.
For trying to show us a road to survival.
We offer our support and our respect. We hear the call to protect the
water protectors to listen, learn and get engaged. They are brave. We
thank them.

And we can give thanks for the bounty.

Like water on the garden of activism,
America’s surprise president brings a bounty of opportunity. The great
issues of our time are now brightly illuminated and people are becoming
more aware of them than ever, from sea to shining sea, from Standing
Rock to Wall Street.

The surprise president elect was not the
winner of the popular vote, does not have a mandate for the change of
ideals envisioned. Keep in mind, close to over two million more people
voted for another candidate.

Nor is the surprise president the leader of
the free world. Two hundred of the worlds nations believe in science,
above the profits of the oil, gas and coal industries, and are
committed to working together to protect the future from an unchecked
climate crisis.

The surprise president claims he does not
believe in climate science nor the threats it presents and his actions
and words reflect that claim in tangible and dangerous ways.

Do not be intimidated by the surprise
presidents' cabinet appointees as they descend the golden escalator.
Those who behave in racist ways are not your leaders. The golden tower
is not yours. The White House is your house.

Your growing activism in support of freedom
over repression, addressing climate change, swiftly replacing a
destructive old industries with safe, regenerative energy, encouraging
wholistic thinking in balance with the future of our planet; that
activism will strengthen and shed continued light on us all. These
worthy goals must be met for the all the worlds children and theirs
after them.

This is our moment for truth.

Unintimidated, stand, speak up and show up. Be
counted. Be like our brothers and sisters at Standing Rock. Be there if
you can. The progress we have made over two hundred and forty years as
a nation, has always come first from the people

Fidel dies! He had
just turned 90- Here
August 13, 1926 - November 25, 2016

Standing Rock

Feds order DAPL [encampment]
shutdown"Although the news is saddening, it is not at
all surprising given the last 500 years of the treatment of
our people. We have suffered much, but we still have hope
that the President will act on his commitment to close the
chapter of broken promises to our people and especially our
children.—Dave Archambault II, Standing
Rock Sioux Tribe"

Bernie Sanders gave 2 live
video addresses: The future of
our country and "Stop D.A.P.L." (at the Whitehouse)Here** & Here**

"Thousands
took to
the streets in Miami, Atlanta, Philadelphia,
New York, San Francisco and Portland, with many demonstrators
blocking traffic and voicing fear, contempt, and anger at Trump's
racist, sexist, and Islamaphobic comments and proposed
policies." - Here

"Thanks to
the
arrogance of the Democratic Party leadership
that stifled the Sanders revolution, we are entering a very
dangerous period with a Trump presidency, and this will be
a time to see whether our system of checks and balances
functions as our Founding Fathers intended." a snippet
from Truthdig
by its editor, Bob Scheer - Here

Feds order DAPL [encampment]
shutdown"Although the news is saddening, it is not at
all surprising given the last 500 years of the treatment of
our people. We have suffered much, but we still have hope
that the President will act on his commitment to close the
chapter of broken promises to our people and especially our
children.—Dave Archambault II, Standing
Rock Sioux Tribe"